CIS 6930/4930 Cryptographic Anonymity

Classroom: CSE-E119

Hours: MWF 5 (11:45-1:40)

Contact Information

• Office: E346 CSE
• Phone: 352/505-1579/392-1200 sec'y
• Fax: 352/392-1220

Syllabus

This course will develop the various needs for, ways to provide, and ways to measure anonymity. We will examine applications of anonymity in electronic communications, e-voting, e-cash, etc. Mechanisms such as cryptography, Mixes, blind signatures, and steganography will be developed in the context of anonymity. Information theoretical and other approaches to measuring anonymity will be applied. Students should have good mathematics and probability background. We will use papers from the literature; students will be expected to present and critique their own work and that of others.

Announcements

• Rubrics:
  • Presentation Rubrics (undergrad)
  • Presentation Rubrics (grad)
  • Software Rubrics (undergrad)
  • Software Rubrics (grad)
  • Term Paper Rubrics (undergrad)
  • Term Paper Rubrics (grad)
• Clarification on bonus below: if you can put everything needed into the IEEE manuscript format, then that can serve as your final report. Those with software or experimental project will need to submit additional materials (see Rubrics), and will almost surely have more material than will fit into 6 pages. For the bonus, pick either the angle of emphasizing the experiments, where the software is incidental to these, or emphasizing the software, where the experiements are a demonstration of its use.
• Extra credit for submitting a 6-page final report extended abstract in IEEE manuscript format by 12/16/. See Canvas assignments page.
• Friday 11/20 be sure to attend Seminar by Mike Reiter: Side Channels in Multi-Tenant Environments in CSE 404 at 11:00.
  Start of class will be delayed due to the talk.
• Exam 2: Dec. 9 in class.
• Exam 1: Nov. 13 in class.
• Sample exam question:
  How do the anonymity metrics differ for simple mixes vs. pool mixes? Why is this necessary? Compare to the anonymity metrics used for Crowds.
• Homework 3: Submit via Canvas in doc, docx, or pdf format by Friday Oct. 2 Project Proposal:
  1-2 pages, including:
  • Working Title
  • Team members
  • Aims of project
  • Approach(es) you will take
  • Deliverables
  • Resources (cite references, useful web pages, etc.)
• index file under lectures is now fixed - lecture 3b is what it should be
• Homework 2: Submit via Canvas (when it comes up - watch this space!):
  Text file noting the places where you came under photo/video surveillance. Include where (e.g., Walmart, Mall parking lot, intersection of 34th and University, etc.), and a total number.
• Homework 1: Submit PDF via email attachment. Due Tues 7:00 pm
  One page self-introduction, including:
  • Title (Anonymity - Homework 1) - upper left corner (1)
  • Your name (First Last, preferred name) (1)
  • Your preferred email address (0.5)
  • Date (0.5)
  • 3x5 photo of yourself - upper right corner, recognizable (2)
  • Your computing background (1)
  • Your mathematics background (1)
  • Your security background (1)
  • Why you are interested in this course (1)
  • A little about yourself (1)

Final Project Papers

• artin-FinalDraft.pdf
• cabrera-FinalDraft.docx
• cavitt-FinalDraft.docx
• chettiar-FinalDraft.pdf
• choi-FinalDraft.pdf
• cronin-FinalDraft.pdf
• hazarika-FinalDraft.pdf
• le-FinalDraft.docx
• maheswaran-FinalDraft.pdf
• mccoy-FinalDraft.docx
• mehta-FinalDraft.pdf
• mirani-FinalDraft.pdf
• odegbile-FinalDraft.pdf
• pittaluga-FinalDraft.pdf
• pradhan-FinalDraft.docx
• rajguru-FinalDraft.pdf
• silcott-FinalDraft.docx
• smith-FinalDraft.pdf
• tang-FinalDraft.docx
• winninger-FinalDraft.pdf

Lecture Slides

Final Presentations

• Tuesday 12/1 5:00 pm - 404 - Choi, Smith, Maheswaran
  • Joseph Choi: Making NTM More Meaningul(Tues pm)
  • David Smith: Too Many Cooks (Tues pm)
  • Kanna Maheswaran: Enhancing Chaum Mixes with Randomness (Tues pm)
• Wednesday 12/2 11:45 pm - 119 - Artin, Silcott
  • Mitchell Artin: Loose Routing in Mix-Nets (Wed am)
  • Aaron Silcott:Anonymous Health Information Exchange (Wed am)
• Thursday 12/3 5:00 pm - 404 - McCoy, Rajguru, Chettiar
  • Connor McCoy: How Many Messages are You Anonymous For? (Thurs pm)
  • Ajinkya Rajguru: Proof of Work for Mix Networks (Thurs pm)
  • Neil Chettiar: Cost to defeat the N-1 Attack (Thurs pm)
• Friday 12/4 11:45 pm - 119 - Le, Mehta-Burgunder
  • Alan Le: Image Steganography (Fri am)
  • Mayur Mehta and Mitchell Burgunder: Steganography over Multiple Cover Images (Fri am)
• Monday 12/7 11:45 pm - 119 - Jain-Sachdeva, Odegbile
  • Cavitt Adding APNs to a MANET (Mon am)
  • Odegbile Anonymous Storage and Retrieval (Mon am)
• Monday 12/7 4:00 pm - 404 - Cabrera-Doherty, Cronin, Cavitt, Mirani
  • Cronin The Silk Road (Mon pm)
  • Conor Doherty and Ken Cabrera: Tor (Mon pm)
  • Jain-Sachdeva: Trust in Anonymity Systems (Mon pm)
  • Mirani: Bitcoins And Anonymity (Mon pm)
• Tuesday 12/8 4:00 pm - 404 - Pittaluga, Pradhan, Winninger
  • Pittaluga: Hybrid Mobile Anonymity Networks (Tues pm)
  • Pradhan: Crowds Risk Reduction (Tues pm)
  • Winninger: Increasing Crowd Anonymity via Dummy Nodes (Tues pm)
• Wednesday 12/9 11:45 pm - 119 - Hazarika, Tang
  • Hazarika: Modified Onion Routing (Wed am)
  • Tang: Simulation and Evaluation of Attacks on Mixes (Wed am)

Reading assignments

• The following five papers are from IEEE SmartGridComm2015, and deal with privacy concerns and solutions for smart grid operations.
• Combining Electric Vehicle and Rechargeable Battery for Household Load Hiding
• Worried About Privacy? Let Your PV Converter Cover Your Electricity Consumption Fingerprints
• Privacy-Preserving and Secure Communication Scheme for Power Injection in Smart Grid
• Authenticated Down-Sampling for Privacy-Preserving Energy Usage Data Sharing
• Privacy-preserving Spectral Estimation in Smart Grid
• Nov. 5 - Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms (voting part) by David Chaum
• Nov. 5 - Efficient Receipt-free Voting Based on Homomorphic Encryption by Hirt and Sako
• Oct. 26 -
• Oct. 26 - Compact E-Cash by Camenisch, Hohenberger, and Lysyanskaya
• Oct. 19 - Untraceable Electronic Cash by Chaum, Fiat, and Naor
• Oct. 19 - Achieving Electronic Privacy by Chaum
• Oct. 12 - Dining Cryptographers by David Chaum
• Oct. 5 - From a Trickle to a Flood: Active Attacks on Several Mix Types by Serjantov, Dingledine, and Syverson
• Sept. 30 - Capacity Estimation and Auditability of Network Covert Channels by Venkatraman and Newman(-Wolfe)
• Sept. 30 - High Level Prevention of Traffic Analysis by Newman(-Wolfe)
• Sept. 28 - Metrics for Traffic Analysis Prevention by Newman, Moskowitz, Syverson, and Serjantov
• Sept. 21 - Toward an Information Theoretic Metric for Anonymity by Serjantov and Danezis
• Sept. 14 - The Disadvantages of Free MIX Routes and How to Overcome Them by Berthold, Pfitzmann, and Standtke
• Sept. 9 - Hiding Routing Information by David M. Goldschlag, Michael G. Reed, and Paul F. Syverson
• Sept. 2 - Crowds: Anonymity for Web Transactions by Michael Reiter and Aviel Rubin.
• Aug. 31 - Anonymity Terminology (local copy)
• Aug. 31 - Generalising Mixes by Diaz and Serjantov
• Aug. 26 - Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms by David Chaum, Communications of the ACM 24(2), February 1981
• Aug. 26 - Networks Without User Observability - Design Options by Andreas Pfitzmann and Michael Waidner, in Proceedings of EUROCRYPT 1985.

Web Sites

• Freehaven Website
• Freehaven Anonymity Bibligraphy
• CMU Data Privacy Lab
• Technical University of Dresden's Privacy and Data Security Lab
• 33 Bits of Entropy Blog
• Electronic Voting blog by Rebecca Mercuri